Healthcare workers at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland prepare for strike
On Wednesday June 18, more than 1,300 healthcare workers will launch a strike at University of California San Francisco’s Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland. The walkout was authorized by 70 percent in avote by members of the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) members.
The strike is taking place as Trump sets into motion a coup d’état, mobilizing National Guard troops and Marines to Los Angeles and carrying out abductions and deportations nationwide. Around 27 percent of the city of Oakland are foreign born, and half of the city’s children have at least one immigrant parent.
The strikers include nursing assistants, respiratory therapists, housekeepers, clerical workers, and medical technicians. These are essential staff without which the hospital cannot function.
Their contracts expired in April. Professional staff, such as mental health therapists and speech pathologists, are barred from striking until their contracts expire in September.
In an immediate sense, this strike is in opposition to UCSF’s so-called “Integration Plan,” which will go into effect on July 6. The plan would have hospital management fire current employees and rehire them as University of California (UC) employees doing the same work, in the same facilities, for significantly reduced take-home pay.
UCSF claims there will be no layoffs or cuts to base pay. But workers will lose up to $10,000 annually through sharply increased costs for health and retirement benefits under UC system plans. Healthcare premiums, previously zero, will now reach nearly $200 a month for individuals and close to $1,000 for families. The new retirement scheme is so abysmal that many longtime employees are being forced into early retirement.
The NUHW also says that $20 million would be diverted from members’ pockets through violations of anti-subcontracting agreements. These moves will undoubtedly accelerate the staffing crisis, drive out experienced caregivers and erode patient care.
This plan is not a merger, says UCSF. But by requiring termination and rehiring under new terms, it nullifies existing contracts and either forcibly places NUHW members into UC unions or strips them of union membership altogether.
Dozens of workers would become “at-will” employees, stripped of job security, seniority, and essential benefits like educational leave.
This is a major attack which could set a precedent for workers elsewhere. The struggle at the hospital is for the rights of workers everywhere and for high-quality public healthcare. The potential exists for the building of a broader movement linking up the strike with the enormous political and social opposition demonstrated by the 11 million who took to the streets in last Saturday’s “No Kings” protest.
But this requires that workers organize rank-and-file committees to take control of the strike out of the hands of the NUHW bureaucracy. Rather than a broad struggle uniting workers across the San Francisco Bay Area, their strategy is merely to preserve the inadequate contract that already exists and to isolate the strike by diverting workers into pointless appeals to state Democrats. In fact, the “Integration Plan” has the full support of state Democratic lawmakers.
The union accuses UCSF of engaging in a “Trumpian attack” on workers. While there is certainly a parallel with the actions of the would-be fuhrer, the fact is the Democrats are the one orchestrating this attack. UCSF Health is part of the University of California system, governed by the UC Board of Regents—whose members were all appointed or reappointed by former governor Jerry Brown or current governor Gavin Newsom, both Democrats.
The UC system is fully under Democratic control, and UCSF’s top officials, Chancellor Sam Hawgood and UCSF Health CEO Suresh Gunasekaran, were appointed and elevated by the Democratic Party establishment. These individuals collect seven-digit salaries while slashing the pay of hospital staff.
Hawgood has overseen a massive expansion of UCSF’s real estate empire while cracking down on campus protests, especially targeting pro-Palestinian demonstrators with accusations of antisemitism. Gunasekaran, for his part, has a long record of managing hospitals like corporate enterprises, pushing “efficiencies” that mean layoffs, longer wait times and fewer staff.
The role of the Democrats in this mass firing and rehiring program illustrates why the party has refused to take any measures to seriously oppose the fascist policies of Trump. The Democrats, the other party of Wall Street and American capitalism, share Trump’s basic hostility to the working class and are far more afraid of legitimizing a mass movement from below than of Trump’s attacks on democratic rights.
This means that NUHW bureaucracy’s appeals to the UC Regents to reverse the integration plan is like begging an arsonist to put out the fire.
The union has long portrayed itself as a “Sanctuary Union,” opposing Trump and his anti-immigrant attacks. But its actual allegiance lies with the Democratic Party. Under Obama and Biden, deportations hit historic highs. Public health continued to be gutted, and trillions were been funneled away from the working class into war and into the profits of major corporations.
The NUHW’s lawsuit to compel arbitration and its reliance on court proceedings is calculated to avoid an escalation and assist hospital management and the Democratic Party by diverting workers into a dead end. While they speak of an “open-ended” strike, the reality is that they will call it off as soon as they can, not when workers’ demands are met.
Workers must in particular be on guard against any agreement which allows the NUHW to continue receiving dues money from the workers in exchange for hidden concessions elsewhere.
This is the same union that has worked hand-in-glove with Kaiser Permanente through “Labor-Management Partnership” scheme aimed at disciplining workers, suppressing strikes, and maximizing efficiency.
The struggle at Children’s Hospital Oakland cannot be won through appeals to the Democrats, legal maneuvers, or passive reliance on the NUHW bureaucracy. It must be seized by rank-and-file workers themselves.
The events of June 14—when millions of people took to the streets in protest of Trump’s fascistic agenda and the bipartisan assault on democratic rights and science—have shown that the working class is ready to fight. But a real struggle, both against Trump and in defense of their standard of living, requires a strategy based on the political independence of the working class against both parties.
As Willie Williams, an orthopedic technician at the hospital, put it: “There’s no difference between what Donald Trump is doing to federal workers and what the University of California is doing to healthcare workers in Oakland.”
Healthcare workers must build independent rank-and-file committees outside of the control of the NUHW bureaucracy. These committees must link up across hospitals, clinics and state lines to organize a general strike against the corporate control of healthcare and the bipartisan destruction of public services.
Only through such an independent mobilization—by and for workers themselves—can the danger of austerity, dictatorship and war be stopped.
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